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The processes of formulation of language policies have not been researched thoroughly. This paper aims to explore the relationship between ideas, power and agency in language policy-making and specifically with reference to the formulation of language-in-education policy for multilingualism in Ireland. Through an argumentative approach to language policy and using a discursive institutionalist framework, the paper examines data from policy documents and interviews with policy actors in the Department of Education and Skills. The paper reports on the ways in which agentive discourses are constrained and enabled by institutional structures. The analysis shows how power resulting from asymmetric internal forces and the hierarchical architecture of institutions prevailed over the capacity of some actors to promote their ideas through discourse. Moreover, it shows how static ideational elements are powerful structural constraints on agency. The paper argues for a conceptualisation of actors in policy-making as agentive individuals who engage in a dynamic struggle over ideas to realise complex and changing policy goals. It concludes by claiming that a focus on discursive forms of power in the policy analysis at the so-called macro level would be beneficial for language policy scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the Irish-language adscape through an analysis of the profile of two Irish-language newspapers, Foinse, published in the Republic of Ireland, and Lá, published in Northern Ireland. The advertising in both papers is analysed in terms of products and services advertised, advertisers represented and language used. Our results indicate that Irish-language advertising in these papers tends to be confined to traditional domains, and to be used by advertisers who are complying with language planning directives. Beyond this, advertising in Irish is used to identify with certain communities, and its use by private sector advertisers, in a context in which there is a weak communicative motivation for doing so, tends to be mainly symbolic. Our small study shows that the respective advertising profiles of these newspapers do little to challenge common sense assumptions about the language, its role and its status in the respective sociolinguistic environments of both publications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the complex and sometimes ambiguous attitudes of Gaeltacht Irish speakers towards the intergenerational transmission of Irish. It focuses on first language speaker data that was gathered as part of a larger field-based project among fluent, habitual speakers of Irish in the Múscraí Gaeltacht region in County Cork, Ireland, and compares the findings to Ó Riagáin's study of the more strongly Irish-speaking Corca Dhuibhne Gaeltacht some 20 years beforehand. It concludes by describing a contemporary in-group initiative to encourage Irish-language socialisation and some of the challenges faced in persuading Irish speakers of the merits of an all-Irish household approach to language retention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how competing discourses about the ownership of the Irish language in an increasingly multiethnic Ireland and the extent to which it is associated with a sense of 'Irishness' influence the formulation of recent Irish-language policy at institutional and national levels. As part of a broader study on the language ideology and practice of Irish-speaking immigrants to Ireland, a critical analysis of their discourse in relation to questions of language ownership and ethnocultural self-identification was performed. A similar analysis of the public discourse was conducted by examining public statements, policy documents, letters to the editor and newspaper articles from the English-language media that addressed questions of language, immigration and identity. The informants' discourse reveals a social-constructionist ideology about the ownership of Irish and the permeability of the Irish-speaking ethnoculture that challenges the ethnically essentialist character of the public's discourse on such matters. It is this dominant public discourse, however, that informs language policy to the exclusion of more social-constructionist perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper explores the extent of Irish language use in networked communications' and attitudes towards the language by 125 schoolchildren from three backgrounds in Ireland: (1) an Irish-speaking area (Gaeltacht) and Irish medium of instruction, (2) an English-speaking area and Irish medium of instruction, and (3) an English-speaking area and English medium of instruction, with Irish as a school subject. The questionnaire-based research found that token usage of Irish was high, but the lack of domains of language usage meant that children had little opportunity to use the language for real communication. It was also found that as the level of exposure to the language decreases, so too does the level of communicative usage. Respondents tended to employ networked communication through Irish, if Irish was the usual language of communication with the particular interlocutor, and those who used Irish in various domains of their lives also used it more in their networked communications. With regard to the participants' attitudes towards the language, English medium schoolchildren were found to have the most positive attitudes towards the language; however, Irish medium and Gaeltacht schoolchildren were more aware of the importance of bilingualism and its practical benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how Russian speakers in Ireland delimit and describe (their/the) Russian language in relation to representations of standard Russian. It is based on analysis of discussions conducted between speakers of Russian living in Ireland, facilitated by the Our Languages (2008–2011) research project, investigating multilingualism and sociolinguistic dispositions amid Ireland's Russian-speaking population. Three metalinguistic orientations are foregrounded: (1) participants affirm the naturally and normatively discrete identity of 'the' Russian language; (2) despite this unitary identity, participants distinguish between registers and levels of relative purity in Russian; (3) participants relate generalised linguistic form to a concept of community. The interplay of these orientations – toward an essentially unitary and unifying Russian language, away from 'improper' forms of that language, and into reflection on collective identity – reveals a model culture of standard language within the polyglossic context of Irish society, combining the routinely claimed characteristics of generality and authenticity. The article interprets the contradictory dynamic between these characteristics in relation to a Bakhtinian concept of monolingualism and a critical conceptualisation of language community. Participants configure Russian as one among 'our languages' through the iterative negotiation of a tension between ideological monolingualism and actual heteroglossia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]